My girlfriend is a Ph.D. candidate doing work related to algae biofuels. Her experience indicates that at present biofuel production is still too inefficient (t

My girlfriend is a Ph.D. candidate doing work related to algae biofuels. Her experience indicates that at present biofuel production is still too inefficient (the algae aren't easily persuaded to produce massive stores of triglycerides) and extraction is costly (the present methods for extracting the triglycerides don't scale well at all), and that isn't changing fast enough to make algae viable in anything like the next year. Moreover, she claims that a lot of research groups are actually too optimistic in the numbers they report because their analysis methods are questionable. This claim is related to the fact that she's working on a new analysis method that gives far better resolution of triglycerides versus contaminants (chlorophyll, phospholipids, et cetera) and as a result she's come across a lot of problem cases that the present method can't discern. In short, she's familiar with the state of the art and she's pessimistic that it will ever go anywhere, let alone within the next year.